Depiction can override truth the same way that memory can override experience.

We talk often about being in a media-saturated society, and we are surrounded by image streams. But it's nihilistic. There's a real randomness to all of it.

Depiction can override truth the same way that memory can override experience.

Stores are the same everywhere; small downtowns are done. Not just in America, but globally. You hear the same music on every station, all our building materials look the same, and all our clothes look the same. But I thought that it couldn't be that simple, because Arizona is not Minnesota. There is this other reality, which is a reality of landscape.

Artworks, whether fiction, music, or painting, because they have the power and possibility to become truth, when repeated enough or told enough are somehow truth about what America is, whether they were or not.

Now, at a moment when photography is so pervasive that it's been forced to grapple with its own identity and look inward, it feels like a natural moment for painting to look out, to reclaim that directive of picturing America.

There are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning.